“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”
I’ve been a presidential politics junkie since before I could vote. Part of that, I think, comes from growing up in Battleground Florida, where even the most placid and uneventful national election is cause for riot and shooting war. I remember watching Dukakis speak at my high school in the fall of 1988. I briefly shook hands with both Clintons when I volunteered on his campaign in 1992. Worked in the Hillsborough Elections Office supporting early voting efforts in 2004. They were all bloodbaths. (And the less said about 2000, the better.)
Living in California since 2007, I still have a hard time not covering for the mortar rounds every four years. California isn’t a battleground. Everyone knows that, every four years, the state outcome will have a 30-point margin in favor of Pacific blue. There are no rallies. No ad carpetbombs. No crisscrossing bus tours. No fights in the streets. There’s just the general sense that, no matter what happens in the nation at large, here it’ll still be California.
This year, that’s the only damned thing holding my sanity together.
This election has represented an existential crisis for me unlike any other year. On one hand, we have a seasoned politician who has spent decades fighting for the Oval Office, and while unquestionably qualified for the gig, will never be able to overcome the generally accepted handicap of not being born a white male. But on the other hand, we have what could only be described as a monster. A nightmare who represents not the best of us, but the utter and complete worst in us. We’re on the cusp of potentially placing the Abyss itself into the White House. And all because a lot of people think that’s preferable to voting for a girl.
After the first debate the other night – one that required some alcohol to make it through – I tried to explain to Kristi why this one was so personal for me. I know this abyss, I told her. I know this monster. Very well. I know what it can do, what it can turn people into. What it will turn people into. It’s a monster that makes more monsters.
The next morning, she sent me a link to this article about Trump and the tactics of emotional abuse. I recommend it.
A lot of people who have suffered emotional abuse are having a very difficult time in this election, because they see the monster, as well. They see the abusive husband, father, boyfriend, pastor, brother, and friend. They see it happening in front of them and scream, WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? And, like me, they wonder how many people out there are supporting him not because he’s a Republican, or because he’s not HER, but because this is what they WANT.
They want a sociopath in the White House. They want to see the world burn. They want to see the abusive bully white male in charge, and they want to see scores settled. And they want everyone else crushed to spiritual dust.
That’s the existential conflict for we who have long suffered monsters.
There’s an obvious and well documented false equivalency at work in this election. We all hear it every day. Yes, he lies, but she lies, and everyone lies, so it’s a wash, right? No, it’s not. Without getting into the fact that she really doesn’t lie all that much, that’s not the problem, anyway. You don’t work your way into the halls of power anywhere without shifting a truth gear from time to time. It just doesn’t happen.
There’s an old joke about public relations that I’ve found very useful in my own work over the years: “PR is the art of denying the truth without actually lying.” At worst, she’s adept at denying the truth. He’s just straight up lying.
But again, it’s worse than that. It took me decades of bad experience to learn the truth about monsters. What makes them monsters is not that they lie, or screw people over, or even abuse. They do, of course. Repeatedly and without shame. They don’t care. They want to see the world burn, and they want to burn it. But no, that’s not it.
What makes them monsters is that they make more monsters.
This struck me particularly while reading two books recently. The first was Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance. Vance grew up as the working class son of a drug addict in rural Ohio, went on to graduate from Yale, and his book is a look back at where he came from and how he has struggled with that as an adult. He talks about growing up with abuse, and about how even today, he has to work to keep his temper and own abusive potentials under control – as well as his horror at seeing them there at all. At one point he describes the terror of becoming the monster in his own closet. That line really resonated with me.
The other book is We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch. It’s probably the definitive text on the 1994 Rwanda genocide. He spells out in great detail how extremists created a society that normalized the murder of half their population: not in camps, not in an industrial government-run Nazi-like terror, but as simply neighbor murdering neighbor with machetes. How it’s not possible to blame it on lack of education, or the economy, or anything like that, because a lot of the murderers were middle and upper class Rwandans. Some were doctors and pastors. And then Gourevitch describes how the very same dynamic then led to an international community turning a blind eye to the carnage.
Monsters creating monsters.
I look at the white nationalists, and I see the monsters. I look at the hand wringing, “I can’t vote for HER” voters (both red and blue) who think that somehow it’s all just going to work out okay, and I see the emotionally abused housewife who has allowed herself to be corrupted into becoming a co-abuser of her kids. I see one possible future, and dread the day when the monsters are turned loose in the streets, with the winds of national mandate at their backs. I see the passion, the “authenticity”.. and the jackboots and the long knives. I see the flames. I see the retribution. I see the blood.
I see the monsters.
Over the many years, the question has haunted me. How can I rationalize a monster back into a person again? How do you learn to trust an abuser? Monsters successfully live in society based on a single principle: that others will give them one more chance, because we’re all indoctrinated to look for the good in people, because when you’re dealing with a person, that typically works. It doesn’t work with monsters. They’ve simply learned that, no matter what they do, you’ll eventually forgive and forget, leaving them to do more of it.
To look for the good in a monster, you must gaze deep into the abyss. And let the abyss gaze deep into you. And that’s how you become a monster yourself. You can’t love a monster without being one.
It’s probably the hardest lesson I’ve ever learned about life: that, while love does seem to conquer all, often what it conquers is the decency of the soul. That love is oh-so-very capable of corrupting beyond measure, of destroying sanity, ruining self-worth, and turning otherwise good people into something less than human. That you have to distinguish between the love that affirms and the love that tortures, twists, and finally murders the right and the good.
You can’t love a monster without becoming one.
A long time ago, I learned to finally shut my own closet door and not open it again. The monster knocks from time to time. Assures me that, if I just open the door, everything will be fine and it’ll all work out. Says all the pretty words, shows the passion, says and does everything it thinks will get me to turn that knob. And, on occasion, I listen to the siren song a touch longer than I should, and start thinking that maybe, this time could be different. I’ve grown. I don’t need the door anymore. I can love a monster.
Then I look at the people I care about, my wife and family and friends, and know that I can’t ever open that door again. It’s simply not a risk I can take. My soul is fragile, a shredded rag of what it probably once was, but more precious to me for that. So I nail another board over the closet door and walk away. For a while.
And then I watch this election, and I see America debating about how well it can love a monster.
And I know that America’s closet door is so much larger. So very, very much larger.
An awful lot of monsters can fit through that door.
And an awful lot of decent people are ready to attempt to love them.